RECAPITULATION, CRITICISM, AND RECOMMENCEMENT. 285 



as their common cause? When all the actions accompany- 

 ing an earthquake are explained as consequent upon the 

 slow loss of the Earth's internal heat, how is it possible to 

 go lower? When the influence of light on the oscillations 

 of molecules has been proved to account for vegetal growth, 

 what is the imaginable further rationale? You ask for a 

 synthesis. You say that knowledge does not end in the 

 resolution of phenomena into the actions of certain factors, 

 each conforming to ascertained laws; but that the laws of 

 the factors having been ascertained, there comes the chief 

 problem to show how from their joint action result the 

 phenomena in all their complexity. Well, do not the above 

 interpretations satisfy this requirement? Do we not, start- 

 ing with the molecular motions of the elements concerned 

 in combustion, build up synthetically an explanation of the 

 light, and the heat, and the produced gases, and the move- 

 ments of the produced gases? Do we not, setting out 

 from the still-continued radiation of its heat, construct by 

 syntliesis a clear conception of the Earth's nucleus as con- 

 tracting, its crust as collapsing, as becoming shaken and 

 fissured and contorted and burst through by lava? And 

 is it not the same with the chemical changes and accumula- 

 tion of matter in the growing plant ? " 



To all which the reply is, that the ultimate interpretation 

 to be reached by Philosophy, is a universal synthesis com- 

 prehending and consolidating such special syntheses. The 

 synthetic explanations which Science gives, even up to 

 the most general, are more or less independent of one an- 

 other. Though they may have like elements in them, they 

 are not united by the likeness of their essential structures. 

 Is it to be supposed that in the burning candle, in the 

 quaking Earth, and in the organism that is increasing, 

 the processes as wholes are unrelated to one another? If it 

 is admitted that each of the factors concerned always oper- 

 ates in conformity to a law, is it to be concluded that their 

 co-operation conforms to no law? These various changes^ 



